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The New Confessions (2000)

The New Confessions (2000)

Book Info

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Genre
Rating
4.15 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0375705031 (ISBN13: 9780375705038)
Language
English
Publisher
vintage

About book The New Confessions (2000)

I'm a big fan of William Boyd. He’s a writer who produces one-off novels that can surprise, entertain and sometimes prompt the reader to think rather more deeply on a subject than they otherwise might. I don't always like his books – I disliked Armadillo intensely – but I can never fault the quality of his writing. And he can produce stories that grab you and haul you through its pages and spit you out at the end breathless and panting for more. Brazzaville Beach is a case in point.So how did this one fare? Well I'd been putting off reading it due to its apparent similarity to another of his books Any Human Heart - a book I liked a lot. Both follow the fortunes of a man born at the start of the 20th Century and track his life, taking in some of the major world events that followed. But I needn't have worried, I left it so long that I'd forgotten pretty much everything about AHH by the time I picked this one up!John James Todd is born in Edinburgh in 1899. I enjoyed the sections covering his early life but the story really came to life when he found himself (against his better judgement) a foot soldier in the First World War. I won't give much away but suffice to say he spends some time in captivity and during this spell he comes across a book that is to be his inspiration and his obsession: The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher. Todd had been interested in photography from an early age and this evolved into a love of film making. He vowed to make a film of the epic autobiography.That's probably all I want to say about the plot – better to discover the delights of Todd’s journey through life for yourself, if it feels like it might float your boat. What I will say is that it is a spectacular journey, filled with all the ups and downs we all experience and told with a rich vocabulary and a gift for delivering genuinely laugh out loud anecdotes. There is sadness too. It’s all here.The overriding message is that life is deeply paradoxical and fundamentally uncertain – you can't double guess it and there's no point trying to work through the ‘what ifs’ either. It will be what it will be.It's a long book, at nearly 600 pages, but what a full and interesting life it was for Todd. There were times I really forgot I was reading a fictional novel, it sucked me in so deeply. It touched every emotion and I feel enriched for having read it.As a footnote, I spotted an interesting similarity with a stream of Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full. In Wolfe’s tale one of his characters, Conrad Hensley, discovers a book whilst he too is imprisoned. This also proves to be a life changing moment as his enlightenment of the Stoic philosophy shapes all that transpires thereafter for him. For those who haven't read Wolfe's novel it's another I'd highly recommend.

William Boyd is not the kind of writer who wows you or hits you over the head with his writing, but ever so subtly he draws you into the story and before you know it you are half way through and wanting more. John James Todd, the fictional autobiographer, begins the narration with his birth in 1899. Each chapter closes in 1972 with words from the present day protagonist as he assesses himself at age 73 looking back on his life which took him to both World Wars and to America. A seminal moment for him comes as a prisoner of the Germans in WWI. While in solitary confinement, he is desperate for reading material and his young German guard agrees to bring him books in exchange for...a kiss! In his desperation, the very heterosexual Todd agrees and so begins a lifelong friendship. The title, "The New Confessions" is a paean to "Les Confessions" by Jean Jacques Rousseau (the book he reads in German prison).

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I found The New Confessionals really engaging in parts but then also found it wandered off and I lost interest in quite a few sections. The style as another reviewer has said is very similar to Any Human Heart, which also uses William Boyd's clever, chatty style to better effect than used in this book.I wouldn't say this is my favourite of Boyd's work, though I still have a lot to read, and as there are lots of his other books to read I don't think I will be recommending it to any but the most completist of Boyd's fans.
—Manda Graham

I sort of feel about this one the reverse of what I felt about Any Human Heart - in AHH the character really annoyed me in his earlier life, but I warmed to him and thought his later life very moving. I this one, I thought the early war experiences and film-making part was suberb, but then there was no light in the later half of the book, everything went wrong, and there was no humour or joy to balance it. Boyd is obviously very interested in writing about whole lives, but in this case I think h
—Oriana Wilmott

I recently reread The New Confessions by William Boyd. This is one of my favorite books, and rereading it is always a pleasure. That can't be said about a lot of books, even ones I liked a lot the first time around. The Baron in the Trees also has that quality, and they have an unusual connection in that each touches on the European Enlightenment.The New Confessions is about a peripatetic English filmmaker whose career reminds one a little of Abel Gance here, Luis Bunuel there, with some D.W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, and Hollywood 10 thrown in. It is a credit to the imagination that Boyd can contrive a situation that allows an Englishman to inhabit all these roles. (He repeats this feat in Any Human Heart, but The New Confessions is the better book.) The series of unlikely events is far-fetched but basically believable. Rereading it, I find myself cringing at John James Todd's self-destructive inability to compromise. When I first read it, I admired that. That's one thing that makes this book great; the protagonist embodies these characteristics that are bound to strike one differently as one reads it over again.John James Todd is not a monster, but he is careless and thoughtless, and hurts people he shouldn't. He's selfish in a very particular way (though not greedy). He is capable of generosity and even heroism. He's incredibly narcissistic. All these qualities make his life interesting, and the novel proposes that his strengths and weaknesses, his weird up-and-down life story are in the end unimportant; his masterpiece, a film adaptation of Rousseau's Confessions, is what counts. The New Confessions is a ringing endorsement of art. For a nonbelieving lover of beauty like me, it's an inspiring notion.And yet... You read the book because John James Todd's life is so fascinating and moving. And the work of art that is the purpose of his life is, in the end, a fiction. We readers never will see The Confessions film because it doesn't really exist. This is the irony of any book about creating great art. Boyd knows the irony is there and plays with it. I suspect he, like me, is a true believer in art. But he is too smart not to realize the problematic nature of writing fiction about art. This separates The New Confessions from, say, Somerset Maugham's The Moon and the Sixpence, an inferior book with a similar theme.
—Robert W

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